454: ‘Getting the Snack Right’, With Chance Miller

Summer tech lulls and beta cycles

0:00How are you doing, Chance? I'm excellent. How's the summer treating you? Not bad. When you texted me this morning asking if I could do the show, I was thinking, like, it's been kind of slow these past few weeks. We're in kind of the doldrums. We don't have Beta 5. We're just kind of sitting on our hands, it feels like. Yeah, it's funny. I was on that TBPN show, the one that the OpenAI bought, and it's like a YouTube thing, and they asked if the summer was busier than usual, and I kind of had to

0:34put on my, well, I'm talking to people in the greater tech world, it is a very busy summer because the AI thing is a mania that is continuing. In the Apple-specific world, no, I would say. I mean, there is the added drama of the OpenAI lawsuit, which I do want to get to, but that isn't really a steady churn, right? I mean, that's the thing that's going to play out for years and years, barring any surprising settlement. So you can dissect it for a few months at first, so then it's just going to

1:09have to wait. Yeah, it's like the Epic Games thing. We spent, I think, first time I was on the show, maybe we talked about Epic Games, and it's like, oh my God. I know it is a very odd measure of time, but I had a lot less gray hair when the Epic thing started, and it's, you know, as slow as other things move, you know, and we all want everything that we're unhappy with to move faster, nothing moves slower than the legal process. Nope. We'll get to that. But you did mention, it's a good opening topic, that even iOS 27 is slow,

1:44and my friend, Will Haynes, who I sort of, it's not like a commercial project, but if he's, me, him, and Craig Hockenberry from the Icon Factory do Ketoba, which is a dictionary app for iOS. You could just K-O-T-O, I'll put it in the show notes, but it's not in the App Store because it uses APIs that you're not allowed to use in an App Store app, so if you want to use it, you have to, like, get it. It's open source, you can get it from GitHub. Anyway, he's a friend, but for years and years and years, Will has, I'll put a link

2:20to this in the show notes, too, his iOS version history, where he tracks the betas for, and I'm looking, it goes all the way back to iPhone OS 2.0, and just tracks how many betas there were for each release, and it's, like, iOS 20, it's, so it's interesting, like, the .0 releases are obviously very different than the .1, .2, .3 releases because this is the

2:55big summer beta. It looks like Apple's only a little bit behind, but it feels to me like a lot behind. So, right now, as we record, and again, there is no better way to guarantee that beta 5 will come out than me and you recording this. As you started talking, as you pointed to Will's website, it came out. Beta 5 is now available. Did it really? Yes. As we're listening. Ah, that's late breaking news. Well, that's fantastic that it came out while we're recording. I actually made it happen. I jinxed it so hard that it came out. All right, well, it looks to me like beta 5 came

3:33out, like, third week of July last summer, and beta 5 came out for iOS 18 two summers ago around the same week. So, it looks like they're maybe, like, three weeks behind for a beta 5. You know, I don't know what the holdup is because overall, maybe that's the thing, is that iOS 27 has been pretty stable, but I also think iOS, I've been using them on my iPhone. I think beta 4, the one that we've been stuck with since the very beginning of July, has been the worst of all of them.

4:07Yeah, I think so. I don't know if you have it, but the most frustrating bug is you search for an app in Spotlight, and none of the app icons show up. So, it's just a bunch of blank. So, you type, like, I in wanting to get to Instagram. All the icons are blank. It's like app roulette. You just tap one and hope that the one you're tapping is Instagram because it's blank. You don't know what it is. So, a lot of little things in beta 4, I think. But it's impossible to know what the holdup is because there are so many, like, factors at play with these. Like, maybe, like, some of the engineering

4:39team, like, these teams are so small. If half the engineering team's just out of the office for a few days or they're focused on something else, then, like, yeah, you just push it a week. They're surprisingly flexible, I think, despite the fact that they are usually pretty consistent. What's your experience been like with the beta of 27? All in all, really good, I think. It's the obvious, like, Siri AI has been twofold, I think. The new stuff that it can do with personal context, digging into everything on your phone, mail messages, reminders, wallet, all of that stuff has

5:13been remarkably reliable. But where I've started to have more problems, and it's weird because it started in the later betas, is where trying to do things that the old version of Siri could do right 9.9 out of 10 times. So, setting a timer, adding a reminder, adding something to your shopping list, controlling a HomeKit scene. At some point between, like, beta 3 and beta 4, maybe, there seemed to be a regression in how reliable those things were. And we heard about it some at the tech talk that you and I

5:47many other members of the press went to at WWDC, where there's, like, that intermediary layer trying to determine which direction a request needs to go. And one example I've been using is, like, I'll say, add something to my shopping list. And it'll come back and say, you don't have a shopping list. Would you like me to create one? I do have a shopping list, and it's there. And then, so one time I said, okay, create the shopping list. And it said, I don't have the ability to create lists and reminders. It's like, that side of things

6:21is really buggy for me.

6:25I had one the other day where I needed to set a reminder to, well, I mean, I'll just use her name. But we have a friend, we got caught in a rainstorm, and a friend named Andrea let us borrow me and my wife some umbrellas to get home in a thunderstorm, walk home. And I wanted to set a reminder to return her umbrellas. And I said, remind me to return the umbrellas

6:55to Andrea. And Siri AI on the phone said, was that Andrea? Andrea? You know, spelling the name different ways. Andre or, it was like four different things. And I just said, Andrea. And then it just asked again, was that Andrea, Andrea, Andre, or whatever. And I said, and I just took a different one. I just said, Andrea. It doesn't matter to me. Like, whatever it said, I would know what it meant, right? It could spell, it could say Andrew. And I would

7:27know exactly what it meant. Umbrella to somebody whose name is vaguely, you know, starts with A-N-D. And I went through this, it was like, obviously caught in an infinite loop. And at the last one, I just said, you pick. And it actually, that actually worked. And it did pick the wrong name, but it actually, it actually worked. It made a decision. Yes. Which I thought was kind of interesting. Because I did, I thought that you, I thought this was stuck in some kind loop. And I'm just, I'm unsure even of the ways that it breaks down now. Because it's so clearly

8:05ground up a new system, right? Like, that loop I got stuck in was all new. I don't remember that ever happening with Siri before. I remember it mishearing me. I remember saying, I can't do that. I remember, you know, all sorts of other frustrations, but never repeatedly asking me, Andrea, Andrea, Andre, or whatever, and me saying one of them, and then it just repeating the exact same question again. And being able to say you pick and having it work, that actually is kind of

8:38clever. I think one of the things they've done, and maybe they've toned it down a bit through the betas, but at least in beta one and two, the dictation model for Siri interactions seemed to be like hypersensitive. It did not ever want to assume what you were saying. And it thought if, if there was like a 50% chance that it misheard you, it was going to ask you to clarify. Because my example of a very similar situation is I ask it for years, almost every day, what time do the Reds play tonight? Because I watched the Cincinnati Reds. And usually it's like

9:09some games are at 7, 7, 10, 6, 40. Like just, so I just want to know exactly what time does it start in iOS 27. It started saying, did you mean the Cincinnati Reds or the Boston Red Sox?

9:23And I would say, I meant the Reds and it would say Reds or Red Sox. And you have to put the Cincinnati in there for it to be confident enough just to tell me the score or tell me the time. Tell me the time. Yeah. Or tell you which team. Yeah. Yeah. So one step or two steps forward, one step back overall, it is, you know, there's some, I know some people want to argue about comparing it to the frontier, which is, you know, it is a big part of today's tech news is what the very latest fable and, you know, whatever the chat GPT version

9:57numbers are capable of, which is so far beyond what we're talking about with Siri. Not even that saying that Siri is dumb. It's just that we're talking about just getting basic stuff right. It's just really is, it's not even apples to oranges because they're both fruit. It is like comparing a whole meal to a snack, right? It's like, let's just get the snack right. I don't know. It is. And it's good overall, but it, and it's definitely progress, but it is still sort of

10:28confusing at times. And to me, the baseline isn't like, Hey, what super advanced stuff can you make? Can you have this make an entire app for you? Can it look at the source code for an entire Xcode project or a website and do stuff like Siri AI doesn't even try to do stuff like that. Put that aside. And to me, the baseline for what it should be able to do is if you hired a college intern, right? And if you have chance hired a college intern and you said, Hey, I don't, I actually

10:59don't know. Do you live in the Cincinnati area? I live in Michigan. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and everybody in Louisville is Reds fans. Right, right. But that's a very quick thing that a human being would learn about you, that your favorite team is the Cincinnati Reds. And if you just said to your human assistant, Hey, every day, tell me, you know, if I ask you, you know, just know, I, you know, cause the times vary, you know, I don't know, maybe they're playing out in California and it's going to be on at 10, 10 30 at night. And you said, what time are the Reds on tonight to a human being? They would never in a million

11:33years. Ask you, you mean the Red Sox or the Cincinnati Reds? Like that's just baseline. Yeah. And it's still kind of frustrating that Siri isn't getting to that baseline. Like the first time. Sure. But that seems like something that it should be able to remember about you. Yeah. Part of the overall, my time with iOS 27, there's is a, like a psychological element, especially with the personal context stuff, because we've spent the last, however many years thinking, well, if I ask Siri this, it's going to bomb. It's not going to like, I'm

12:07not even going to bother trying to ask it because I know it's going to get it wrong. And throughout iOS 27, it's been like a mental training to be like, maybe I could ask it that and it'll get it right. And then you start doing that. It accurately responds to enough of your questions that you start to learn that it actually is a quite a bit better than it used to be, but it's been bad for so long that at least for me personally, it's like, I don't trust it yet or I didn't trust it at first. So in beta one and beta two, I wasn't using it as much as I could have because that mental model of thinking it was

12:40terrible took a while to overcome. And I think that's going to be a thing when it ships to everybody in September, like there's not going to be a resounding response from iPhone users saying, wow, serious, good. It's going to be like a trickle as people try things and learn that it's finally, mostly quite a bit better. Yeah. I talked about that on a recent episode with Quinn Nelson and we both have the same problem where it's the hardest part of testing it is remembering to use it in, in the flow of daily life. Like when I'm actually actively thinking about it, you know, and I'll install beta five

13:12when we're done recording this today and I'll be thinking about it the rest of the day, but like just out and about in daily life, it just does not often does not occur to me and I'll search for something the other way. And then afterwards I think, ah, I should have used Siri AI. And then I'll go and do it, not in the flow, you know, and just see, ah, and it even would have worked, but I don't think of it. There is some learned behavior not to bother trying that is that they need to overcome. Um, what have you, have you been using the apps, the actual Siri apps?

13:46I've used it on iPhone quite a bit. I, I've kind of tried to replace you, my use of chat, GPT or Claude, just trying the Siri app on Mac. Not at all. Really. I don't think it's well enough integrated into Mac OS to really be useful. And I think, I think overall, cause so part of German's reporting up to WWDC was like, will they, won't they make a standalone Siri app? And up until March or April, he was like, well, they're testing the models with a dedicated app,

14:18but they're probably not going to release it. And then it was like, okay, maybe they will release it then. Yes, they're releasing it. And I think that kind of shows in the quality of the app across iPhone and Mac, especially where it's very basic. I heard something, I mean, you know, this is me dipping my toes ever so gently into the rumor game. I heard something at, while I was out in California, WWDC that I don't want to go into detail much, but basically that, that part of the code

14:53and the project at Apple changed kind of remarkably close to WWDC, you know, that I don't know what, I don't even remember exactly what month, but something like March or April that like, it's like, Hey, why don't we do an app? And somebody put one together and they're like, yeah, now you're in charge of Siri. And because this is a good idea, you know, that I'm not trying to make excuses for Mark Gurman, but that I actually really do think in this case, that actually was a fairly

15:29significant change internally. And, and to the surprise and possible consternation of people at Apple who were working on whatever they were going to use as the visual presentation layer at that point. And I think it's a good idea, but I agree with you. It just feels very thin and nowhere does it feel thinner than on the Mac, you know, it just is like, cause, and I can't use it day to day cause I am still on my main work Mac, still using Sequoia. So I don't get it. And I think often,

16:04but I am using it on my iPhone and I'm going to it before I go to chat GPT. And it is, it is succeeding for so many of the things I've used chat GPT for, and I don't miss it. It is slower. I noticed when I go back to chat GPT, like, Oh man, chat GPT is a lot faster to respond. This feels like chat GPT. When I first started using chat GPT two years ago, but I, you know, it's, it's not too slow. It's just, you know, and if you're not used to, if you're currently using chat GPT a lot or, or

16:38Claude or whatever else that's fast, you might look at the results of this and be like, I'm not switching to this. It's slow. Whether you think the results are good or not, why, why use the slow thing. But for all the people out there who haven't been using one on a regular basis, it's pretty good. And, you know, you can trigger it from the side button on the lock screen. You don't have to unlock your phone. It is a huge convenience factor. But when I'm at my Mac and I often think, Oh, I kind of wish I could use Siri AI on my Mac so I could continue testing it this

17:10summer. And then I do use chat GPT classic. And I noticed all the ways, like the ways that it will attach itself to a BB edit window or to the current note in Apple notes. And I think I do not want to give this up. Like the same reason I don't want to, I'm not going to switch to their stupid ass chat GPT super app that doesn't, you know, the super app that misses the best features chat GPT classic. Uh, I'm going to hold on to chat GPT classic as long as they will continue to

17:41let it be used. And it's not even the speed thing. It's the integration thing. It just doesn't. I don't know, but you know, hopefully I don't expect a lot between now and the fall when Mac OS 27 golden gate actually ships, but hopefully it is a, you know, major point of development after 27.0, you know, I don't know. I do applaud them for making the chat just a standalone chat bot app because it felt like if they weren't, if the reason for not doing it felt like pride more than

18:16anything, because they've said all along, they didn't want to make a chat bot app, but people want a chat bot app. I want a chat bot app app because typing to it is honestly the most natural way to interact with it, especially if you're just researching something. Yeah. And to like silo it all off, however, they were going to do it without an app, I don't think would have made sense. Yeah, I do think, you know, so I do give them credit for that, you know, uh, turning, you know, doing effectively an about face, you know, and they've definitely managed to do it without saying

18:48that they're doing an about face, which I don't blame them for. And I would do if I were them in, in charge of the messaging too, but I'm glad they did. And I just feel it is the common sense of, Hey, chat is actually just a good interface. You know, it is why human beings spend so much time in text messaging with each other. It is a, it is actually, and it, it's a thing that has stuck.

19:21It it's, you know, I, I would say I started using what looks like a modern chat style interface back in the instant, we used to call it instant messaging days of iChat and the apps of that era. And it's effectively unchanged since then it's just gotten technically better with syncing between devices and being always on instead of having to actually log in and being end to end encrypted with services like iMessage and WhatsApp and Signal. But it's, it's just a good interface

19:53that people get, you know, they understand it and it's simple. And, you know, the, the time oriented nature of, Hey, new bubbles are at the bottom and you go keep scrolling up to go old, you know, to go back in time. It, people understand it and you're on this side and the person or thing, if when the case of a chat bot is on the right, it just works. And so I feel like if they had not done it and presented something else as the visual layer of it, it would almost certainly be worse.

20:29And just for the sake of being different and putting aside the technical limitations of the old Siri, it was just frustrating up until now that you couldn't go back. Like if you knew that yesterday, you had had an interaction with Siri that answered a question and you've already forgotten the answer, not being able to go back and look at it and having to start all over again was super frustrating. And if you look at it from Apple's perspective and sort of not, not, not growth hacking, Apple doesn't need to growth hack anything, but if you want people to know that you're trying

21:02again and that Siri is different and better now, the best way to do it is to slap a Siri icon on their home screen for the first time. Yeah. Yeah. They updated iOS 27 and it's there. Yeah. I agree. You know, I think the other thing that maybe they tied themselves in knots wasn't, um, Hey, all these other companies that everybody is saying is ahead of us and that we're hopelessly behind. They're all doing chat bots. So we don't want to say we're doing a chat bot because then it looks like even more like we're catching up. So let's just say we don't think chat bots are a great interface, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think the other thing they got,

21:35they maybe tied themselves in knots over was the idea that having a chat transcript is a privacy problem. You know, that you might want to say things to Siri and not have a record of them. And I think they overthought that. I think it is great that Apple thinks of privacy way at a way higher priority than I would say any of its peer companies. But in this case, what is the privacy violation? Like I've been thinking about it, you know, on that privacy front as I've used chat GPT

22:10for years. Like I don't even trust open AI nearly as much as I trust Apple, but I do trust that my actual chat transcripts with chat GPT aren't nobody else is going to read them and nobody else has access to my devices. So how would they read them? And if somebody does get access to my devices, I've got bigger problems than them reading my chat GPT transcripts, right? Yeah. And I guess I haven't even looked, I'm presuming that if you don't want Siri transcripts, I'm sure there's a setting to turn it off. But I think the settings are the same as messages, which is delete after 30

22:46days, delete after 60 days, something like that. Yeah. Something like that, which, you know, it's great. I haven't said to save forever. What do I care? Honestly, you know, I feel like the security layer is that my phone is locked and people don't know my passcode and I don't tell people my passcode and you know, it's being too private, right? That's what I think if you're, if they were worried about that. And I think maybe they've just sort of realized, Hey, what is the point of this? You know, what, what is the point of worrying about the privacy here? We can do this and keep it private, you know? And, and I would honestly say my personal chats in iMessage are way more, have way more

23:22stuff that I would not want somebody else to read than my Siri interactions. So yeah, if, you know, if you're allowed to keep an Apple encourages, I mean, they don't make it as easy as possible to search your old stuff, but it's there. Why not? I saw an example on threads or somewhere of somebody, I think people are going to realize how much stuff is in their messages history because this person was Siri and iOS 27. They said, what's my social security number? And it went and it found it in an old messages thread, like with their partner or something. Cause you're exactly right. People

23:54will send and save just about anything and messages and they forget that it's there. And now Siri can surface that for better or for worse for some people. Yeah. And I guess if it uncovers something, you know, I mean, you'd have to ask for it, for it to be uncovered, but if you discover, Ooh, I wish that wasn't there. You know, you can delete an old text message. I think, you know, I think that if you delete it, if it uncovers it and you tap it and it shows up, you can delete it. And it's only deleted for you. Obviously it's not

24:25deleted at the other end on the person you were corresponding with, but I think it deletes to all of your devices. I don't know. I mean, it's always been there. And it is funny to think from a privacy angle that, that because I message search is still so bad that people forget how much is in our archive. I've noticed that too. I guess the last point on that point is that at WWDC, Apple made a big deal out of the fact that they have rewritten the search backend for mail and say,

24:58and kind of admitted, Hey, mail search just kind of sucked for a long time. And, you know, we knew it and we fixed it. And I think it is better. I really do. I mean, I'm mostly amusing it on my iPhone because my main Mac is still running Sequoia, but it does seem like search is better faster. And when I know I'm looking for a thing that is in my email, it does seem to find it. The search in the messages app though is not updated. And I asked about that. We had a briefing

25:33about the sort of snow leopard. Did you get that briefing? I think so. Yeah. It was sort of like, here's how this is like, they even said snow leopard, you know, I think they said iOS 12, which I didn't recall as a bug fix. Let's fix underlying stuff year. But, and I don't know, I don't really remember iOS 12 specifically, but I asked, Hey, you guys said mail search is better. Is messages search better too? And it got one of those Apple, great Apple non-answer answers, which was like a smile, which said a lot and a, that would be

26:11something for us to look at in the future. Yeah. Which is interesting because it seems like Siri AI for the personal context stuff, the hierarchy of where it's going to look for answers to your personal context, like messages is near the top. It might, it might be number two to mail, but somehow they're, they're doing it without having actually re-architected the actual search for users in the messages app. Yeah. Well, and that is the, and maybe because it is computationally expensive somehow, because it does take a while, but I have personally found, this would be my tip

26:46for people listening. If you are looking for something in your messages and the actual traditional search in the search bar in the messages app isn't helping you or is giving you so many results, it's not helpful. Ask Siri AI and tell it to search in messages, you know, search messages for the time chance told me his social security number and, you know, which you've never done or at least have not done yet. Yeah. But, but that works way better than searching

27:18the old fashioned way in the search field. And I can't really blame them for not making the search field a front end to Siri. Cause I think that is, it's just is more expensive. I don't know if it's expensive locally. I don't know if it's going out to private cloud compute, but whatever it's doing, it takes long enough that you can tell it's, but it actually works. So it is sort of, it is sort of weird that the built-in search is kind of crappy, but you can fix it by doing what's seems like a very complicated or should be an unnecessary workaround of going to Siri,

27:53but it actually does work. That's it's, which is kind of unusual.

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30:37you, the other breaking news that happened, I knew about this cause I was embargoed on it, but the embargo is apparently up live baseball and vision pro coming later this month. Yes. I was hoping we could talk about this. Yes. I'm very excited. It is the first Friday night baseball with what's the word? Not interactive, immersive, immersive video. And it is a game between my beloved New York Yankees. And I think it might be an exhibition game with a triple A team

31:12called the Boston Red Sox. Yeah. Excellent. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. Lots of Red Sox mentioned so far this episode. Unfortunately. Yeah. Four games total. I think it's, it's Red Sox, Yankees, Angels, Pirates, Padres, Giants, Giants, Dodgers. So if you're Jason Snell, you get your Giants in there twice, even though. Yeah. Yeah. Abysmal, abysmal baseball team, but you can watch it immersively. I feel like it is not a coincidence that the first one though, is Red Sox, Yankees. No. Probably. And again, I am biased at least halfway. I mean, but everybody involved in that

31:47rivalry is biased only halfway. I think the best rivalry in baseball, possibly in U.S. professional sports, two teams that truly despise each other. Yep. Very, very exciting. And I think like a lot of things, and I don't know, maybe it's just the way, you know, because they're going as fast as they can and whatever the hiccup has been to getting, you know, doing this in Vision Pro for live sports, even though they have Friday night, you know, we all, I, at least I thought, well, they have Friday

32:21night baseball rights. I kind of thought they'd get this going sooner than they did. And here it's, you know, only starting at the end of August. So they've only, they're only going to have four games before the end of the season, but that's better than nothing. And maybe, you know, uh, you know, it's as fast as they could do it. And why wait till next year? Let's, let's start this year. And I remember the original Vision Pro demo at WWDC and what had been 2024, I guess. One of the things in like that sizzle reel was, I think it was a Red Sox game.

32:54Yes. You were sitting, I think behind the dugout or in the dugout. Yeah. On the first baseline. Yeah. I remember it. That is cool. And they did the NBA thing earlier this year with like the four or five Lakers games. Yeah. But that was, it was really cool once you got to watch it, but that one had like the blackouts and the rights restrictions. Like you couldn't actually watch it live unless you lived in Los Angeles. So this is better from that perspective because if you have Friday night baseball, you can just watch it and you can watch it live, which is going to be really cool. Yeah. They've got a Friday night, uh, game

33:30with the Reds at the Brewers on September 11, but alas, no, uh, no goggle icon next to that one. Um, but this is very cool. I, I, I do, I suspect that it's going to be like, I, I don't know. I'm reading the description here that it's sort of like, I think it's going to be like the basketball games where they jump you around with your viewpoint, you know, that you don't get to, you don't get to like pick a seat, you know, from the, like, let's

34:01say they put three seats and camera up three locations and you get to control it. I think they're going to move you around, but I know my, my dithering colleague, Ben Thompson is particularly, uh, uh, adamant that you should be able to stay in the same seat and, you know, control it yourself, but I'm just excited. I don't want to complain. This, that feels like looking at gift horse in the mouth. I mean, this is, this should be super cool. Um, I mean, I would, I really would watch triple a teams play immersively just to see

34:32it. The fact that it is the Yankees, Red Sox. And if the season ended today, both teams would be wildcard teams. I believe, um, you know, it's, it should be, you know, what? 18 days from now should be high, both a high stakes game in a, in a rivalry that's always feels high stakes. So awesome. Awesome news. Yankees fans have it nice. Cause they also did the stadium tour, the Yankee stadium tour in immersive video. And that, I mean, I don't like the Yankees, but that was a, that was a fantastic immersive video kind of example.

35:04So yeah, it was, uh, you know, I don't like the Dodgers, but I would love the same, I would love the same thing at the Dodgers at Dodger stadium. Yeah. I would even take it at, uh, that rat infested shithole Fenway park. I mean, honestly, you know, especially if they showed all the rats and stuff like that, that'd be great. Uh, uh, vision pro still alive. I love it. It still makes me laugh. It really does. Uh, and I guess we could parlay this into the next subject, uh, as a bit or segue. Um, it's still, when I think about it makes me laugh.

35:38That they raised the price of vision pro by like the most token amount possible. Like it can't possibly be commensurate to the Ram in the device compared to it. It really, to me was like somebody, uh, you know, and I don't blame them again. I think I would have done the same thing where they were like, Hey, we don't need to raise the prices. We're hardly selling any units. The Ram is just, it actually is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $4,000 price tag of this thing. We don't need to raise the price, but I think

36:13they were like, yeah, but if we don't raise the price, people are going to think that the product is dead, right? There's so many rumors that this is a dud that we're walking away. We want to make, let people know we, you know, this is still a, uh, active product with a future ahead of it. If we don't raise the prices, you know, it looks bad. And so they raised the price, like, I don't know, $5 or something. And the other thing I was thinking, like, are they still, do you think they're still actively, they can't still be actively making that many

36:44revision pros? Like presumably they've made. Right. Enough to satisfy demand right now. I would think so. I remember. And it, it, with the home, with the original home pod, there was some sleuthing based on like the copyright dates on the boxes and the serial numbers, but you know, and again, Apple never confirmed it, but there was some sleuthing that strongly suggested that there was only ever one production run of the original home pod. And you know, then when they

37:16stopped, it was, and it's kind of an unusual product line because they, it wasn't dead, obviously, right. You can go to an Apple store now and buy a second generation home pod, but they had that in the works, but it wasn't ready to go. And it wasn't out yet, but they, I guess they ran out of original home pods, didn't want to make more of them. And so they had this uncomfortable, we're not going, we, you know, home pod is no longer for sale, but it is not dead. And lo and behold, the new one did come out later. And I can't help but think that vision

37:49pro is kind of like that, right. That they, they made a bunch of them with the M five or whatever the hell ship they updated it to. And it's, you know, I don't think they had to make many. So I, whatever they, you know, again, the new prices of Ram, probably you're right. Chance probably aren't raising the price. I think it's really just a sign of life. And that same thing applies to the Apple TV probably too. Like they're not, I don't think they're still making new Apple TVs like that. They probably have what they need to satisfy that. And it's still got a right $70 for something absurd, like $70 price increase, which,

38:23Oh yeah. It was crazy as a percentage. It was, you know, and people aren't talking about it. I, you know, we can get to the rumors. It's one of the other topics we can get to, you know, on the show, but I, I, I'm not hearing a lot of rumors about a new Apple TV, but it feels like, man, like if this isn't a price increase for new ones that are coming in September or October, boy, it makes no sense at all. Why they raised the price this much. Like

38:53German's latest reporting on the Apple TV is, I think it's the same hedging that it's been for a while now, but ready to ship as early as September, October, I think he said. So may, but all that's going to be new is it's going to have a faster chip. It's not anything dramatically different. Right. Which I, you know, what could be different? I don't know. I mean, the only thing I can think of that could be dramatically different is it wouldn't, you wouldn't know it by looking at the hardware, but if they have a significant home, you know, this is your, what do they call

39:29it? Your home base station hub, your home hub. If it can suddenly do more interesting and useful things in the home hub, maybe. But any, you know, the segue would be to the Ram crisis and the, what the hell is going on. Right. Great way to put it. Um, and I do feel like we just had last week, the week before I forget, you know, I guess maybe it was eight days ago, but whenever

40:02Apple released their earnings, it's Tim Cook's last earnings was Tim Cook's last earnings as CEO. We are recording this on August 10th. I think it's going to come out tonight. So, you know, August 10th, um, we're 21 days out from, uh, John Ternus taking over as CEO on the 1st of September. Uh, it is the very end of Tim Cook's tenure as CEO. He very obviously both, both just observing and taking his public statements at their, at his word, wanted to hand thing, make this

40:40the best and easiest and most seamless transition ever. No drama. Right. And there really hasn't been right. There's no German doesn't have any reports of any, you know, kind of upset within the executive ranks or anything like that. It seems like there was no drama or if there was drama internally, it was entirely self-contained, you know, no drama internally, broad public support. I haven't seen anybody on the technical side, people who are just fans of the company or the

41:10investor side who is like, Hey, what the fuck is up with this John Ternus? You know, every, you know, and he's left the Ternus with record, uh, record, another record quarter. Everything is good except for the Ram thing. Yeah. And there's nothing Tim Cook can do about it. Right. And if there's nothing Tim Cook can do about it, there's nothing anybody can do about it because if anybody could navigate the situation, it would be him. Yeah. The latest I'd link to a thing today that both the New York

41:41it seems to, and it seems to me like can't be a coincidence that the New York times and the wall street journal both had fairly similar reports about Apple sort of, uh, lobbying the, the federal government here in the U S to get permission or a blessing. It's unclear whether they would need a legal exception or just like a blessing, like, Hey, this is okay because it's technically legal, but we don't want to cross a political line to use Chinese made Ram, even if only for devices that

42:19are sold within mainland China itself. But Apple tried that back in 2022 for other reasons before this crisis, I guess for cost savings or just to, you know, they like to have as many suppliers as possible. And this is for multiple reasons, sort of a political red line. And one of the ever more increasingly rare things that is bipartisan here in the U S that both Democrats and Republicans alike are sort of like, Hey, Chinese made Ram is a bad idea. And it's not for a security. As far as I know,

42:52it's not a security thing that, Hey, if you put Chinese Ram in a device, somehow the Chinese have a back door to devices. Cause Ram doesn't have communication ability. That does not how Ram works. It's really, as I understand it, just a, Hey, we don't Ram is such a crucial component. We don't want to give China any kind of leg up in the long-term supply chain for Ram in the world. This it's a bad idea.

43:23And in other areas of computing and components where China does have this position, it has played out poorly for the West geopolitically. And so let's not give them Ram too, basically. And Apple, apparently the reports today are that Apple is still because of this crisis, trying to take a second crack at getting permission slash blessing to use Chinese made Ram. And even in China and both the times and wall street journal reports, they didn't have any names, but they seem to suggest that

43:58politically speaking, the answer is still now. And more interestingly, both suggested that even if they Apple did get the permission, it actually wouldn't help them very much because apparently the Chinese made Ram is all sold out through the end of 2026. Anyway, I don't get if, if that part of it's true, Apple's original strategy was let's get permission from Trump or the Trump administration. Right. And then they would do it despite the fact that they would get blowback from both parties. Or were they hoping that if Trump said yes, the Republicans would fall in line and

44:34they'd support it, but the Democrats would push back against it. So, and Apple can live with that. But now if they're going to go through all of that, those hurdles and headwinds and whatever, and it's not solved the problem, I don't, like what, what's the point? Yeah. I don't know either. Right. You know, and again, part of this crisis is it's not just, oh, and again, Apple did have to raise, or they said they had to, but I, you know, I, I think in some sense they did have to, and other than by taking a severe hit on their own margins, they needed to

45:09raise prices. They raised prices on all products other than what the iPhone and Apple watch, I think. AirPods. Yeah. And AirPods, which possibly aren't affected. Right. I don't know. I mean, they have some kind of memory in them, but maybe actually are not affected by this particular crisis, AirPods. Presumably they didn't raise the iPhone and watch prices because they're just waiting till the actual new devices in a month. And, you know, I guess, I don't know. It is kind of curious

45:42strategy wise, because then I would, if that's what they're doing, and there was a route, do you see that there was a rumor over the weekend that maybe they were going to raise prices on the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro today, which didn't happen, or at least hasn't happened while we were recording yet? Maybe we can make that happen right now. Yeah. Because strategically you could think, well, why not raise the prices now? And then when they announced the iPhone 18 Pro and the, but maybe everything is

46:12so out the door because they're going to do this iPhone folding ultra that's even before this was going to have supposedly going to have a very high price because these folding screens are so expensive and all the other competing folding phones are like close to $2,000 or more than $2,000. And so whatever they raise the price of the iPhone 18 Pro too, it'll look good compared to that. Yeah. I don't know. I think that if they're going to raise iPhone prices, they should have, and probably would have

46:43just done it when they did everything last month. Because if you, if you look at it from a public reception point of view, I think lumping it all in together and doing it all at once is better and getting through that one cycle, then doing all that, letting the chatter about that die down. And then six weeks later say, actually, we're also going to make the iPhones, the current iPhones, not even the new iPhones, the current iPhones, $100, $200 more expensive. Yeah. So, but I guess the other wildcard on that iPhone pricing thing is, okay,

47:15so we're expecting iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone Ultra slash folding, whatever they're going to call it, but I don't know. It just makes sense they would call it Ultra, but I don't want to imply that I've heard anything and it's just a guess, but everybody's sort of centered on the same guess.

47:32Are they going to raise price? And the rumor is that the regular, no adjective iPhone 18 is not going to come out till next March or so alongside the 18 E and possibly a second generation iPhone Air, that they're just permanently going to a, hey, the E and the regular phones will come out early the next year and only the high-end Pro and Ultra phones will come out in September,

48:02but will they raise the prices on the iPhone 17 a month from now in September? Yeah. I don't know. Well, historically, if you think about it on the old cycle, so when they announced the iPhone 17 lineup last September, they kept selling the 16 but knocked it down $100 or $200. So if this cycle, alongside the 18 Pro introduction, typically they would introduce the base 18 and the base 17 would

48:35stay around and go down $100 to $200. So if you're looking at it from that schedule, just keeping the prices the same this year is technically better than most years for that base 17 phone. But it does create, if the 18 Pro and Pro Max are $200, $300 more expensive, the gap between the base 17 and the flagship 18 Pro, that's going to be a $700 gap at that point. So I think they

49:06could just raise the prices for the 17 and get away with it. That's what I sort of think that they'll do, you know, because I don't think they want to make the 17 look more appealing compared to a brand new 18 Pro, right? Like if somebody is out there and just, you know, a normal or closer to normal human being who doesn't follow 9 to 5 Mac on a regular basis and is just vaguely waiting until September or October and then sees that the iPhone 18 Pro has a, whoa, that is more expensive. And then, hey, the iPhone 17 is like $600 less or

49:42whatever, $700 less. I'll just get that. I've been waiting and I'll just get that. I don't think that's what Apple wants. So I think that they would raise the prices then to sort of keep, you know, establish the new pricing tiers of these $100 gaps between $100 to $200 gaps between phones. But I don't know. I mean, I feel like everything's off the table at this point. It's just all uncharted territory. What else? I guess the other weird thing about the RAM crisis is just that it's not just a normal

50:17supply demand thing like, oh, now they're more expensive and you pay the higher price and you could just get as much of it as you want. It just feels like no matter what you're willing to pay, it's like they're sold out, right? It's the rumor. I don't think it's confirmed, but the big three non-Chinese RAM companies, Micron, Samsung, and I think it's SK Hynix. Yes, something like that. Supposedly, they've sold out their future, they're completely sold out of their production runs

50:48for 2027, right? Yeah. Now, presumably Apple is part of that, right? Yeah, I mean, it's almost certain to some degree. Now, are they like, you know, I guess we're good. But a big part of the earnings call last week with Tim Cook was that part of the reason they're facing a crunch is that Mac and iPhone sales are significantly up year over year, right? That they do lock in orders to some degree based on their projected sales.

51:23And Tim Cook said something more or less, you know, and we projected strong sales. We weren't thinking sales would be weak and they are strong and that's why we're caught flat. It was, we thought sales would be good, but they are really, really good. It was like 22% up for the Mac and 29% for the iPhone or maybe the other way around. But, you know, somewhere around 25% up year over year for Mac and iPhone. And they just did not lock in that kind of RAM. And there is no RAM to buy at any price to fill the need.

51:54It's unprecedented. He called it a demand forecast issue, I think was his term. And if there was ever a bad year to really mispredict how many phones and Macs you thought you were going to sell, it's this year. Because any other year, they just go and say, okay, we need 30% more RAM for the iPhone, 30% more RAM. And they get it. Like they say, jump the supplier, say, okay, how high? That is not the case this year. And it's really coming back to bite them. And what was the story? Did you see the story about the, it's, it's affecting the TSMC production of the chips.

52:29Yes. As I recall, it is basically, you know, they have to, because of the system on a chip, everything's integrated. You can't just do, you can't print the wafers and then stick the RAM on when it's done. It has to be there at a, at a production level. And it's, it is halting production of the actual chips because they don't have the RAM part to put on the system on a chip. Yeah, it was from Tim Culpin who, and he, so the A20 Pro, the chip for this year's phones

53:01is going to use TSMC's wafer level multi-chip module or WMCM. And like you said, that's where the RAM is integrated and packaged alongside the chip itself. And what Culpin said was they have $1 billion in A20 Pro chips sitting there that they can't do anything with because they don't have the RAM to go along with those chips yet. And his kind of takeaway was the iPhone 18 Pro could be, probably will be super hard

53:33to find when it comes out. It will be announced and released on schedule like we anticipate, but it'll be the hardest iPhone to get at launch in a while. Because again, it goes back to if any other year they had decided to implement this new wafer level multi-chip module technology, it'd be fine because they have plenty of RAM. But they picked this year, and this is the year that the Ram-mageddon is happening. Yeah. And it's been a couple of years since there was a new iPhone that was literally hard to buy.

54:03I know with the iPhone X, it didn't even come out till November. So it was like they did the September announcement and announced it alongside the iPhone 8. And we got to see it in the media, but then it didn't come out. And even the review units didn't come out until November because they don't like giving review units more than 10 days before products come out. You know, so that in some sense was a supply issue where there was literally zero supply.

54:34But I guess I can't remember the last time there was like, hey, you know, some people who got their pre-orders in right when the pre-orders opened are going to get their iPhone 18 Pro on launch day. But an awful lot of people are going to, you know, and presumably right when the pre-order, if this is true, when the pre-orders open, people, you know, I don't know, half an hour too late or people who are just later in the day or people, I don't know how severe this

55:05will be, but people who like ordering at a time of day when the pre-orders launch, who in the last handful of years would still get their new iPhone on launch day are going to see like two to three weeks or four to six weeks or who knows, you know, what it's going to say. We don't quite know, but I kind of believe it. You know, it's not just that Tim Colpin is a pretty good reporter. It just feels like this crisis is industry wide and there's literally, it's just outside

55:36Apple's control. What are they going to do? Yeah. Every year, I think it's, it's probably you who you say you wake up on well past when pre-orders start every iPhone launch day. Yeah. And you still get one on, it still comes on launch day for you, even though you ordered it at two in the afternoon or whatever. You might have to set an alarm that day to order on time. But the last time I can remember this, anything like this wasn't even at an iPhone launch window. I want to say it was the iPhone 12 pro going into the holiday season of 2020 where Apple

56:09had, they like issued an actual statement, like an update to investors saying we can't make enough phones because the factories in China are shut down because of COVID. Oh, that's the last time I can remember. And that wasn't when the 12 was released. That was two months later because when they released the phones, the factories were up and running and then COVID got worse. Yeah, I do. I vaguely remember that. I'll try to find that and put it in the show notes. And again, overall though, I remember thinking earlier in 2020, like, oh, who knows?

56:44Maybe there won't even be a new iPhone this year. So, you know, 2020 was a bananas year, especially around April, May into June. And overall, Apple navigated that almost remarkably well. Yeah. It's, I don't know, but this, you know, and again, if this turns out not to be that big a deal, you know, if it's like, oh, whatever happened to that, like we, you know, come December and, you know, the iPhone 18 Pro availability is more or less like 17 Pro and 16 Pro were

57:17the last few years, we'll be like, hey, what about that report over the summer that they were going to be backordered? I wouldn't be surprised if any company can pull it off and still manage to keep up with it. It's Apple, but I don't know. I feel like this could be the year to really set the alarm for pre-order day. It wasn't the 12 Pro, it was the 14 Pro. I can't imagine COVID shutting down things in 2022. That's such a, that it affected that many launch cycles for Apple is hard to remember.

57:50Yeah, I don't know. All right. So, well, I'll look for that in the show notes. All right. Let me take another break here and thank our next sponsor. It is our good friends at Factor. Factor makes chef-crafted, dietician-designed, ready-to-eat meals so that you don't have to choose between real food and convenience. These are not meal kits where you get a box full of ingredients that you need to put together. Meal kits are great. I like those too, but Factor, you get whole meals, entire meals that are fresh and they

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Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI

1:01:16See website for more details. Do you want to put your lawyer hat on? I'll put my tie on. Let's do it.

1:01:26So Apple filed the lawsuit against OpenAI and IO, I guess, at the beginning of July? I forget. And OpenAI's only response was some pretty weird PR statements of, we don't have any interest in other people's IP or trade secrets. And then Apple filed, before OpenAI filed a legal response, Apple got a second shot in.

1:02:00They filed their request for a preliminary injunction. And OpenAI then, in immediate response, published, I think, a very ill-considered blog post that was kind of confusing even. But then their law firm filed their request to dismiss the website. And that was a good read. And they have very good lawyers. And that's where we stand. So Apple is saying they want an emergency preliminary injunction before the trial date,

1:02:35I think, is October 1st, or the first trial. They're saying this is so severe and our trade secrets will be so hurt forever if they're allowed to proceed that we need an injunction against them right now. And OpenAI is like, their lawsuit is such nonsense that it should just be dismissed out of hand. I think that catches us up on the high level. Yeah. The Apple request for a preliminary injunction, like what they say is, the harm is happening now, and every day that passes without an injunction

1:03:06allows OpenAI to embed their knowledge of Apple's stolen information into its hardware development efforts. And then as part of that, in a separate filing, they also filed a motion to expedite discovery. And they want OpenAI to hand over their documents sooner. They want to be able to depose OpenAI employees and executives sooner. So they're not like, I know at the start of the show, we said legal cases kind of take a while and they drag out. But Apple's trying to hit the ground running on this one.

1:03:37Right. And everything does move slowly in the legal world. And so we're, you know, this happened, you know, at the very end of July. And the trial date is set for October 1st. So really, it's just August and September in between what's already the trial date. But, you know, at least for the discovery, I could certainly see Apple's desire for that. Like, I do not think, I mean, and the way lawyering works is you, you know, you say, you know, 100%.

1:04:14I say 0%, you know, and somewhere in the middle, if there's going to be some kind of settlement, it's somewhere in the middle. But, you know, as the lawyer, you start with asking for everything or the other side asking for the other everything. Right. So who's going to get closer to what they're asking for?

1:04:41I don't see Apple getting the preliminary injunction. And I'm not quite sure what that would mean. Even I honestly don't know what they're looking to to shut down. It's unclear. Like, are they saying that Tang Tan's employee badge should stop working and he can't come to work in the meantime until the trial? I really don't know. The request for expedited discovery, though, I could see being granted, you know, that, OK, let's get the let's get this process started and an agreed upon framework for what each side is going to have to disclose to the other.

1:05:17In the filing for the preliminary injunction, Apple outlined the five things that it wants, which is stop accessing or using Apple's confidential information, halt ongoing user disclosure, preserve evidence, allow forensic inspections of devices, and allow Apple to search OpenAI system for Apple confidential information. And Apple said that OpenAI agreed to the first three of those. So stop using the information to stop the disclosure and preserve the evidence.

1:05:48But it would not allow the forensic inspection or let Apple search through all of its systems. Right. And translating that into normal talk, it's because they're saying we don't have any of your trade secrets. So, yes, we will stop using the things that we don't have. And then the parts that are let us come in and look to see that you really don't have them. They're like, no. Yeah. If they don't write in one scenario where they literally do not think they have any Apple trade system secrets on their devices or their networking systems.

1:06:21I still don't blame them in that scenario for saying, no, we're not letting you come in here and inspect this. We didn't do anything. Right. You know, if I tell you, Chance, you know, give me back the wallet you stole from me and you have not stolen my wallet, you're not going to let me come into your house and like search for my wallet because you didn't steal it. You know, so, you know, there is no, hey, if they have nothing to hide, why don't they do this?

1:06:53I don't blame them. You know, it's like and if they did, if they're worried because they do think, hey, maybe we did some sketchy things here. Well, then obviously they don't they don't either way, they don't want to concede those points. And I think Apple knew there's no way that they were going to get agreement on those last two points. Either way. Yep. You know, I guess the three possibilities is open. I really thinks they did. There's no there there and they didn't do any of this. Apple open AI knows that they've got some some sketchy stuff.

1:07:24That, hey, that doesn't look good or somewhere in the middle where they're like, oh, we don't we're not sure. Maybe any one of those three. There's no way that they're going to want to give Apple discovery. Right. Part of it goes back to like, I know this got talked about some when the lawsuit was first filed, but. Part of it goes back to what Apple wants from the lawsuit period and also the multiple people named in the lawsuit, because I think that. Tang Tan probably could have kept getting away with what he was doing for a much longer period of time.

1:07:58But on the other side. The Chang Liu. Person, they got they were doing something so obscene and so obtuse and so easy to trace that that's what threw them on tap through Apple onto that scent. Right. Right. And that's sort of my high level takeaway, too. Right. There's there's what they're they've named three people. Apple, they've named open AI as a whole. Tang Tan in particular. And this guy, Chang Liu, an electrical engineer who left Apple for for open AI at the beginning of 2026.

1:08:36I think with this guy, Chang Liu, they've got I think he's got some problems. He's dead to rights. Right. And Apple even got their thing out like open AI is trying to hang their hat on this. It is an unusual use of iCloud drive that Apple has. I've written about it a bit at Daring Fireball and heard much about it after I started writing about it from people who used to work at Apple.

1:09:08So, you know, Apple has this unique I'm sure there's no other company even close to Apple size who uses iCloud drive like this. And part of it is they are using some magic secret sauce. But long story short, if you work at Apple, they encourage you, but don't require you to use your personal iCloud account, your Apple account ID on your work devices. And then you are still iMessageable with your regular phone number.

1:09:41It's everything is more convenient. If you can imagine all the ways that you're as a non-Apple employee that your life would be weird if you had to use a second device with an entirely second separate Apple ID, you know, that's what they're trying. At one level, that's really what they're trying to avoid. And that they I don't know, some number of years ago, they added a feature where if you agree to use your personal iCloud account with Apple with your work, they flag your account and you get a special Apple. I think the folder is literally named Apple work at the top level of your iCloud drive.

1:10:16And then the contents of that folder are where you might share work related documents with your colleagues. And you can use features like, you know, the way that the iWork apps like numbers have collaboration. Like one of the readers who emailed me was like, you know, you know, I know it sounds a little silly, but, you know, one of the reasons people use Google Docs is you can have a spreadsheet and two people can edit it at the same time. And we added this feature to numbers, you know, and it's really cool and it works and we couldn't use it at work.

1:10:48And instead, you know, even though we made this cool feature, we've still had to do the old fashioned thing where we're back and forth emailing or iMessaging each other, saved copies of document name, final revision to date dot numbers. And then somebody else would get it and be like, final, final, final, revision one. Yeah. And you're like, which one is it? Final, final, final or final, final revision four?

1:11:19Which one's the final? And yeah. And, you know, at some level, you're like, oh, yeah, it would make sense if they could just use iCloud. And then you run into, but what happens when you stop working at Apple? Right. What happens if some of your documents aren't in the Apple work folder? But anyway, as pertains to this lawsuit, Apple got out ahead of OpenAI's motion to dismiss and said, as pertains to Chang Liu, yes, there was some of that with iCloud Drive.

1:11:51But all the stuff we're talking about had nothing to do with iCloud Drive and everything to do with a third party cloud storage provider who nobody, neither side has named yet, but I'm almost certain is Box. Yes. Almost 99% sure. Yeah. Right.

1:12:08And Apple said, you know, pretty, I would say, as clear as they could state it, that the stuff they're talking about has nothing to do with iCloud Drive. So any of the OpenAI's lawyers saying, hey, you know, to prove a trade secret, you have to protect it. And the way Apple handles this iCloud Drive stuff with their employees is so sloppy that they're not even protected. And it raises the question of whether these even qualify as trade secrets. It's all out the door or a moot point as far as Apple's concerned, because it was related to Box.

1:12:40And they had, I read the, or not deposition, but the statement that from a hired forensic expert who looked at the logs and showed the dates that Chang Liu had accessed, presumably Box, you know, and it was, you know, at least 37 files or something like that, or 39 files from, and he left the company, left Apple in January. And he accessed them in February, and he accessed them in February, and March, and all the way until, like, April 27th. That seems to me to be not good.

1:13:14The Tang Tan stuff is like, some of it strikes me as kind of word of mouth, like, game of telephone, some of the things he was doing. And I think if Apple had only known about what Tang Tan was doing, I don't know if any of this actually happens. I don't think that's enough to take on a whole company, because they're not just taking on Tang Tan and Chang Liu, which is how they usually approach these trade secrets cases. Like, we've seen them go after different people before for taking things with them when they leave, leaking information while they're there.

1:13:46There were a few of them linked to, who, like, left Apple's self-driving car project to go work for a Chinese self-driving car project, and they took some files with them. Apple didn't go after the company that those people went to. Apple went after the individual person. Right. Which is what makes this case so different, and why I think it is primarily Chang Liu, but since they're going after OpenAI, they can kind of lump it all together. Right. I think one scenario is that this, that Chang Liu was doing this on his own, you know, and if he had asked his supervisor, who, I don't know who, you know, who, you know, if he'd reported directly to Tang Tan or if there was somebody in between them.

1:14:29But if he had asked, you know, should I go back to my, I still have access to my Apple Box account, should I get the documents for Blanc? They would have been like, oh my God, no, you know, no. Let's, you know, let's talk to, you know, legal and figure out the right way to let Apple know that they accidentally still have you access, you know, but whatever you do, don't touch that. You know, they might have said that, or they might have, they might have just said, you know, real cutesy style, like, hmm, I don't know.

1:15:02That's assuming OpenAI has any sort of checks and balances in place internally, and I don't think they're well organized. Right. We have no idea, you know, and I don't want to imply one way or the other. And is, was, is Chang Liu the exception, whether he had any other people within OpenAI and IO who knew what he was doing? You know, is he the one person who had access to these documents and did this? Or was he one of several, and he's just the one that Apple has evidence against?

1:15:38And that's obviously, that's what Apple is saying. They need the broad discovery to find out. I don't know, but I would say of the people and things that are in Apple's accusations, he seems like he's in trouble. When it comes to Tang Tan, who is, I forget his title at IO, but he's effectively the head of the hardware initiative. And he was a senior, or not a senior vice president, but a vice president of iPhone hardware at Apple until he left a few years ago. So obviously still had, had, always had, and clearly still has a good relationship with Johnny Ive, given that he worked with him when Johnny Ive was at Apple.

1:16:17And Johnny Ive hired him amongst other people in Johnny's inner circle at Apple at IO. So he's named in the lawsuit, but as I read it, nothing that Apple has revealed as evidence is unlawful from Tang Tan. You can say that it looks bad, and if it goes to a jury, you know, this is not a criminal suit. It's a civil suit. And so it's not, you know, is Tang Tan going to jail?

1:16:48Nobody's accusing him of that. And so you go to a civil suit, and it's sort of, what does the jury think? And does some of this stuff look bad? Yeah. But is it unlawful? I don't think anything that they've alleged is unlawful. Even the part, if you really read what Apple puts in quotes in their motions, like the part about asking people coming in for job interviews to bring parts, the parts that are in quotes, nothing says bring prototypes or, you know, in development secret parts.

1:17:23It could just be, it could be, you know, bring parts in released devices that you have worked on. And I'm sure company policy at Apple is you can't bring that, right? Like if you worked on the volume buttons for the iPhone 17 Pro, I don't, you know, that's a simplistic example. But if you did the volume buttons for the iPhone 17 Pro, you could, you know, it's obviously not illegal to show Tang Tan the volume buttons from the iPhone 17 Pro because you could stop by an Apple store and buy an iPhone and show them to them.

1:17:57Or, you know, if it's an internal part like a logic board or something, you could use a screwdriver and take the iPhone apart and show it to them, right? And I'm sure if they just have extra parts laying around so you don't have to dissemble a phone that it's against company policy. And, you know, if you just use a part that was laying around the office, you might get fired for taking it off campus to show at a job interview at any company, let alone open AI. But again, is it unlawful?

1:18:28No, there's all sorts of things you'd get fired for at Apple that are not unlawful. You know, if it comes out that you're Joe Apple employee and you've been telling Mark Gurman anything that Mark Gurman reports, you're going to get fired. That's 100% certainty. Did you break the law? No. Yeah, you're not, you know. I mean, now, can you, are you, if you told him things that you had signed a non-disclosure agreement, I guess you're on the hook for a civil judgment, but you're not going to go to jail, right?

1:19:04Tang Tan doesn't work for Apple anymore, right? So I don't think it's unlawful. It just looks bad, right? And like the whole thing, Apple is making a big deal out of like Tang Tan held on to a checklist of what Apple managers do when you say, hey, I'm giving my notice. I'm going to go work at OpenAI. And they're like, oh, well, you don't need two weeks. We're going to call security and you're going to be, you're going to be marched out now. And we're going to ask you for this, that, the other thing. And we're going to have an interview with you.

1:19:35Again, that's not illegal. Apple might wish that people who don't work at Apple didn't have that checklist, but it's not illegal to have it, you know? So I don't think there's anything Apple has alleged to date that is unlawful that Tang Tan has done. Yeah. It's a harder case to prove than it is for Cheng Liu anyway. Yeah. The burden is on Apple to do that and convince a jury of that. Right. Possibility A is they just, you know, and again, it's multiple people. And I've even heard this from people at Apple that at a personal level, John Ternus and Tang Tan never liked each other.

1:20:10And not just that they were rivals coming up through the hardware ranks for what was eventually Ternus' promotion to senior vice president of hardware. And now promotion from SVP of hardware all the way to the, you know, the CEO office. But that they didn't like each other, even beyond the way that maybe two up-and-comers in a company are just not going to like each other for competitive reasons, that they just didn't like each other, period.

1:20:40I've heard that. That could factor into this, obviously, you know. And maybe, too, if they did like each other, you know, that maybe Tang Tan isn't mentioned in the lawsuit, right? I don't know. Who knows? The example that would prove that point would be the Johnny Ive element of it all. He's not named in the lawsuit. And presumably that's because Apple still has respect for Ive in a way that they don't for Tang Tan. Tang Tan. Or that they literally don't have any evidence at all, you know, that Johnny Ives, you know, is not involved in these job interviews that Apple has obviously gotten some details about.

1:21:14And if they do find evidence that he is, maybe they name him. Who knows? Maybe they're, you know, we don't know. I mean, this is, it's, it could be one or the other. It could be that they like him and have respect for him and definitely were trying to keep, are trying to keep him out of it by name. Or it could be that they just don't have any evidence and so therefore they didn't name him. But if they do find evidence, they would. I don't, we don't know. That's to be determined. The third thing. So there's Chang Liu. I think that they've got him on some stuff.

1:21:45And I suspect that Mr. Liu is just going to be cut loose by OpenAI. And if he's the only person involved, then that's maybe the end of the matter. You know, like, oh, well, he did some bad stuff and we're going to part ways with him. And, but we've made sure that everything he brought in and everything he's touched at OpenAI, you know, is expunged from our systems. Tang Tan, to date, again, there might be evidence against him. Maybe Apple has evidence and they didn't put it into motion and they're waiting to see what OpenAI comes, you know, comes back with in disclosure.

1:22:21And then Apple can say, hey, but we already know about these text messages from Tang Tan and they're not in what you've, not disclosed, what's it called? Discovery. Right. That, hey, your discovery is obviously incomplete because we know about this. Like Apple's under no obligation to have already put in their current motions everything they know. I sort of suspect they have because if they really are looking to get a preliminary injunction, they've put everything they've got into it. But who knows? Because the other factor that's in the Apple's thing is this bit, which they don't, they don't name the company, the supplier, but they claim that there is a supplier that knows that Apple has worked with for a proprietary finish to, I think, and I think they say it's a metal.

1:23:07Yes. So presumably either steel or aluminum or titanium, it doesn't really matter. But there's some proprietary finish to a metal with a supplier that Apple considers a trade secret that they've spent money to develop and that they have a proprietary agreement with the supplier. And that OpenAI went to the supplier and said, hey, you can tell us how to do this and we can use this finish too. And we have Apple's permission to do it. Apple doesn't reveal the name of the supplier and without even the name of the supplier, they don't reveal like, here's text messages.

1:23:43We know that they exchange. Apple hasn't said how they know that this happened. Presumably they've talked to the supplier and the supplier was like, hey, somebody, this guy who I thought this guy left Apple and whoever it is. And he came and said, you know, was talking about this finishing thing and Apple was like, yeah, he left, you know, last year. Tell us more. I don't know. But to me, that is the wild card in this whole thing, because that's a pretty, I think, prima facie. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but on the face of it, that's theft of a trade secret.

1:24:17And, you know, it's pretty much the definition of what Apple is accusing them of. But Apple hasn't revealed the details of it. And obviously for this to come, when this comes to trial, they will have to. That's to me the wild card in this whole thing. I think it's interesting that going back to the John Ternus bit a little bit, if John Ternus wasn't behind this lawsuit, would Apple have chosen right now to start slinging mud at OpenAI? Like, that whole, the timing of it is so weird for a company that's been so meticulously planning this transition that you wouldn't just start this without, not just buy-in from Ternus, but Ternus being emphatically behind it and thinking there was more to it than just dragging people's names through the mud.

1:25:05But that's why with Teng Tan, like, I'm a bit more inclined to think Apple has maybe more than they've talked about. And I think Apple's lawyers probably have a reason for particularly emphasizing this need-to-know document so much. Like, for just a single document, they're really, the filings make a real big, put a real big emphasis on it. I think we're entirely right that Cheng Lu is number one. This material supplier thing is clear as day, probably. And I think Apple even says Cheng Lu was mostly behind that, too.

1:25:39And then the Teng Tan thing is the weakest argument, but I think there's enough to it that Apple... That they wouldn't do it if they didn't think there was a there or there. I don't know. Maybe they're more spiteful than we think. I do think it's got to be the case that Ternus, not that he's single-handedly behind it, but that he endorses this lawsuit. Because if he didn't, I don't... Again, Cook's desire to leave Ternus the neatest plate possible coming into the job, even if Cook was like,

1:26:16John, I really think we should do this. And Ternus was like, ah, I don't want to. I just don't want to... I don't want to start my tenure with this ugliness. Because I think Cook would say, okay, you've heard my piece, but we'll do it your way. But keep your eye on this. But I think Cook would actually defer to Ternus because obviously all but these... I don't think we'll hear anything more from Apple until September when Ternus is CEO. So only the very opening salvos happened under Cook's tenure.

1:26:49And it's clearly such a... This transition is exactly... It is Cook's baby, the transition. It is not like the Cook said, hey, maybe I'll stay on. And the board is like, no, you're out. And we've picked this guy Ternus. And Cook is like, well, let me quick hurry and file this lawsuit. That is clearly not the situation. So either Cook and Ternus are both fully on board with it. Or Ternus is fully on board and Cook is like, sure, we'll go your way.

1:27:21But I suspect it's both of them. But one way or the other, it's got to be Ternus. There's no scenario where Cook is on board with it and Ternus is not. And Cook is like, well, screw you. We're going ahead with it. But the other factor, though, I have to say it before we move on, is the other factor that could be the whole point of this is that Apple has no real intention of getting an injunction. They know there's not much more. They've got this Chang Liu guy. I mean, the poor guy might get fired and whatever. But it's not going to really have any long-term effect on whatever OpenAI is already working on

1:27:53with the people who were already there. But that the entire point of this is to stop employees from Apple from leaving Apple for OpenAI. Because if there are others, and I don't know, obviously, that's the sort of thing where you'd have to be insane to be a little birdie, even if you trust me, to say, yeah, I'm still at Apple and I was thinking about leaving for OpenAI. But now I'm thinking, I don't know. But if there are other employees at Apple who were on the fence and thinking, ah, some of the best people I used to work with here

1:28:25are there and they seem pretty happy. Maybe I should go too, and they're still hiring. This might make, I think, that the intention, not as a side effect, but maybe the primary intention of this whole thing is to give those people second thoughts of, oh, do I want to get involved in this and have Apple, you know, if you leave Apple to go work at Google or whatever, you know, they're like, okay, you know, it's been nice working with you. Have a good time. You know, sayonara. I think when you say, I'm leaving and I'm going to I.O.

1:28:57and OpenAI, you're looking for a forensic exam of your digital life on the way out the door and a sort of, hey, the old open door of sometimes people leave Apple, they go somewhere else to a startup for a couple years, and then after a couple years, they come back to Apple. Like, that door closes if you're going to OpenAI, you know. And I think that might give people pause, and that might be the entire intent. Yeah. You know.

1:29:27I mean, in the filing, I was surprised they revealed this number, but they said, I think it's more than 400 former Apple employees are at OpenAI now, which I expected that number to be high. I don't know if I expected it to be that high. I agree, because that's just a very, very large number. And I'm trying to think off the top of my head how many I know. I don't know. I could probably count them on one hand, but definitely on two hands.

1:29:55And I thought that was unusual, but now it makes, if it is, you know, I mean, there's no, nobody's disputing the 400 number, and it's like, oh, well, if it is 400, well, then no wonder I know 567. Right. Or I've heard of 567, because it's 400 people. And I can't even think of who is in second place in terms of having the most highest number of ex-Apple employees currently employed. Probably Qualcomm with the chip team that left Apple Silicon some number of years ago.

1:30:26And there was, you know, some illegal elbow throwing over the legality of what knowledge those people were leaving with, right? That there were some of the people from Johnny Surugi's team involved in the creation of Apple Silicon. Not just Apple Silicon, like the M-Series chips, but like the whole lowercase Apple Silicon from the chips that they've been making under Johnny Surugi's division ever since the PA semi-acquisition in 2010 or whatever year that was, or 2007, that they left for Qualcomm.

1:30:57But it's not 400. I think it's more like 40, right? I think it's a team that could kind of fit on a bus, not 400. And I would guess that that's second place. I've just never heard of anything like this. And I think that could just be the explanation that there isn't anything, there's never been anything like this. And Apple is some combination of angry and concerned about it. And the combination of anger and worry is let's just file this lawsuit

1:31:28and see if that helps put a stop to it. I think Apple employees leave for Google all the time, but Google employees also leave for Apple all the time. That's kind of an open door both ways. I haven't heard of anybody leaving OpenAI for Apple. I can't imagine that's a very common pathway. No. And at this point, and again, I don't know, at a personal level, maybe there's some people who are still, you know, it's like, hey, no hard feelings even if you went. I'm sure for some people, and a measure of their actual friendships and the technical acumen, you know, like, hey, you're so good,

1:32:02we'll take you back, you know, because we'd love to have you back.

1:32:06You know, but I can't help but think that for the average employee who's made this switch, the door might be closed at least for a number of years just because this has been escalated to a level that it hasn't before. And again, there's no, I can't think of any precedent for it, really.

Notion workspace sponsorship break

1:32:21So we shall see. All right, let me take a break here and thank our third and final sponsor of this episode, Notion. Notion AI is a workspace designed to strengthen human teamwork, not replace it. Like, I think a lot of people just, you know, whether your anxiety over the AI moment is high or low, I think everybody is sort of feeling it in general of, hey, what is going on with AI replacing human action,

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1:34:25including OpenAI, Cursor, Lovable, and more. Learn more about how Notion can support your business at Notion.com slash talkshow. That's all lowercase letters, Notion.com slash talkshow to try Notion today. And when you use that link, you're helping support the talkshow. One last topic, and I think it was the last time I saw you in person, Chance, was the Siri AI in the EU situation. Yes.

1:34:57Situation. So the only thing that's happened, there's two things that have happened over the summer. There was a thing, I don't think I wrote about it, where Tim Cook met with somebody, some woman whose name I don't remember from the EU in a private meeting. And, you know, it's what they said. I don't know. We don't know. They were like, well, you know, it was a nice discussion or something. But nothing came out of it. And I haven't heard anything like, oh, you know, we straightened that out.

1:35:28And, you know, now we have a path forward. As Apple left it at WWDC, they were pretty clear, almost using words as strong as this, that they did not see a path forward to launch Siri AI in the EU under the current interpretation of the DMA from them. And, you know, and that they have this idea of the, what do they call it? The... Trusted Systems Agent. Yeah, the TSA.

1:35:58They should have thought of a better name, you know. But anyway, the Trusted Systems Agent. But that it would be an enormous engineering effort. I think they said something to the effect of that it would be the biggest, as they envision it, it would be the biggest engineering effort for compliance with the DMA that they've undertaken to date. You know, more than the alternative app stores, more than the system for alternative web rendering engines, more than the whatever stuff is in the system for taking payments from other processors,

1:36:31you know. It would be a bigger engineering effort to build this Trusted Systems Agent. And the EU was pretty clear that they would have to build it first before the EU would say whether that makes it compliant. That they could spend a year and a half and a lot of engineering talent and resources and time building it and then have the EU pass it around to the competitors and say, what do you guys think of this? And then come back to Apple and say, nope, that's not compliant.

1:37:01And Apple's stance is, we're not going to do it unless we know that the plan we've showed them is, you know, that we have a framework for what would be compliant. That was the biggest sticking point for Apple, I think. It's not just that they wouldn't say no, or not just that they wouldn't say yes, that they wouldn't say no either. Like, if the EU had come back and say, we like this Trusted System Agent thing, but you also need to do X, Y, and Z, they didn't even do that. It was, build it and find out. Yeah, and we don't talk about plans.

1:37:32We only talk about actual proposals. Yeah, that they really, you know, according to Apple, and I think, again, there's some dispute over how detailed the Trusted System Agent proposal is, but I think both sides, this is one of those things where the Venn diagram does overlap that both sides agree that they did not give them any kind of, well, you at least need X, Y, and Z. You know, Apple said they didn't show it to us, so we don't know what to build, and the EU basically said, we don't do that. We don't tell them,

1:38:03you know, what to do. Now, the other news, though, over the summer that I wrote about was that they did give guidance, quote-unquote guidance, to Google for AI interoperability on Android, and it is, I described it as breathtaking in terms of the scope of what they're saying Google needs to offer to third parties to comply, you know, down to the fact that they need to allow third-party agents

1:38:35to provide code that would run on the digital signal processor of the device to process the wake words. Hey, Dingus, you know, like if me and you do a startup with Dingus AI and you say to your Android phone, hey, Dingus, you know, what time am I recording the talk show with Chance, they don't want, you know, the EU, I mean, this is what they're saying they have to do, is the third party has to have code that runs on the digital signal processor,

1:39:06and they say it would be done securely, and it's not just any Joe app in the Play Store could do this, it would be some kind of vetting system, but it's just breathtaking in terms of the level that it's effectively being able to write low-level system software for Android and that they have to allow others to do it. Google did, took the opposite standpoint, I'll just say this, Google did the, well, we're going to ship our thing first and see if it's compliant later, and Apple has taken the,

1:39:36we're going to find out if it's compliant before we ship it into EU first, and I think Google is now finding that perhaps would think maybe we should have done it the way Apple did it. Yeah. I mean, the bullet point in your story about the Google stuff that you describe as madness, but that Google must allow concurrent access to always-on hotword detection. So if you have Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Meta.ai installed, all of them, in addition to Gemini, must be permitted to have always-on audio detection concurrently.

1:40:06Right. How? I don't know. And, you know, it's, and how many different words are they allowed to use, you know? And again, that's part of the argument of innovation is, well, what if you have a very broad idea of the ways that you could wake up the device? And, you know, who knows? The other thing in the guidance, you know, is a requirement in addition to this digital signal processing code. Even if we concede like, oh, I don't understand

1:40:38what they mean by digital signal processing code. Yes, it's very low level, but it's completely isolated. This could be done safely, blah, blah, blah. In the guidance is also that these third-party agents have to be allowed to run as just regular apps in the background unfettered by Google in terms of like, hey, you get 30 seconds an hour or something, you know, that there's some kind of limit on what they can do in the background. It more or less comes out and says that these agents have to be able to do whatever they want in the background whenever they want

1:41:08because Google is the one who's allowed to set the limits on what Gemini does in the background.

1:41:16And, you know, I've never heard, I haven't heard anybody say, hey, I upgraded my Android phone to one that has Gemini built in and now the battery life is trash. I have no reports of that whatsoever. Google obviously is balancing whatever Gemini does in the background with the battery life concerns of, you know, actual users. But if, you know, if they're, if they actually comply with this in the EU, every single third party who does participate in this, it would be up to them

1:41:47whether they take battery life and RAM into consideration with what they do in the background. I mean, it's effectively PC rules on a phone. And I know that there are people out there, every time this comes up, you can see, you know, some of them, and some people feel very strongly that they wish all phones worked like Macs and Windows where third parties could run code that runs in the background. And they, you know, when I defend or argue that this is madness, they'll say, but yeah, don't you, but don't you say

1:42:18the Mac is your favorite platform and don't you run third party things that run in the background? And yes, I do. That's not my phone and they're different things, you know, and there's a reason why phones are so much more popular than PCs ever were.

1:42:33And anyway, if this guidance to Google is any indication of what guidance to Apple would be if Apple were to just ship Siri AI in the EU and then find out from the guidance what they need to add to comply, I can't see how Apple would ever agree to this. Any of it. No. I mean, the way Apple described the trusted system agent thing was like it was an intermediary that would allow assistants to access the same features as Siri AI

1:43:03and Apple intelligence. what the EU is telling Google to do here. We don't know a lot about trusted system agent but based on that description from Apple there's no way half, three quarters of this stuff would work if that's Apple's only as far as they're willing to go. Right. And so, for example, like, I know we don't know what they would want. I don't think they know what they want. I don't think they're technically competent enough to really form opinions.

1:43:34I think they take their advice from competitors but, like, for example, it's not just, hey, Apple would have to open up Siri AI to open AI to ChatGPT or to Claude or to Grok or to, you know, an up-and-coming AI system agent and they would have to get the same access to the semantic index in iOS and Mac or I guess iOS because Mac OS isn't a gatekeeping

1:44:04platform but that semantic index, they'd have to have the same access to the entire semantic index that Siri AI has.

1:44:15A, that alone I'd see as a red flag, right? And I think the trusted system agent, I think you agree too, with something like the way that, like, hey, when third-party apps try to access your photo library, they have to go through a system prompt that gives you, the user, the ability to say, I only want to give this app access to this, this, these four photos, tap, tap, tap, tap, right? Yeah. These four photos Instagram now has access to, but not my whole library. And it,

1:44:45yes, if I want to give it access to my whole library, I can opt into that too, but I have to confirm it and then it can have it. I think that per the EU, you don't have to do that with Siri AI. Like when Siri AI goes to read your Apple notes, it's not, hey, do you want to give Siri AI access to these three Apple notes, you know, or do you want to give it all? It just has access to them because Apple trusts its own Siri in a way that it's never going to trust third parties. But I think to comply, Apple would have to allow

1:45:15the third parties the unfettered, no, no confirmation prompt access to this stuff. And I'm not entirely sure to think why they wouldn't have to permit the third parties to build their own semantic indexes, right? What's to say that Claude Anthropic wouldn't say, we don't like the way Apple built their semantic index. It doesn't work the way Claude does. We want to have access to all the users' email, all of their iMessage history, all of their Apple notes,

1:45:46all of their calendars, all of their contacts, everything else that is exposed to Apple's semantic index so that we can read all of this stuff and build our own semantic index, which is what we need to do to use this. To me, honestly, reading what they said to Google, I think that that's what the EU would say to Apple, that they would have to give third-party AI agents access to every single thing on your devices, iOS devices, that Siri has access to just to build the semantic index.

1:46:16And that's a non-starter. That goes back to exactly what we said an hour ago, which is people have their social security numbers and their messages. It all ties together. It's like... Right. And, you know, it's not just that Apple's being a competitive dick and saying, hey, we are the ones who make this and, you know, the users only get to use our system, which is part of it, that, you know, they are the ones who built the iPhone and so they get to build the system components of the iPhone. But there is also a brand promise to users, which is that when you buy an iPhone,

1:46:47everything the iPhone is capable of doing, even when you install third-party stuff from the App Store, is stuff that Apple says is okay. Right? That is a brand promise that you can, you know, and it goes to the heart of why Apple, you know, the part of Apple's argument for the exclusivity of the App Store is distribution. That people just say, I don't know how to do this. I just trust Apple. That's why I bought an iPhone. And everything I can do on my iPhone, I can't mess up. And it's, you know, whatever I,

1:47:18you know, and if there is anything that I should be careful about, I can feel assured that I will be prompted and have to give permission for. So, honestly, all of that is to say that I, my honest guess is that unless the EU and the European Commission comes back, has a come-to-Jesus moment and says, all right, we're going to rethink our policies on what the DMA requires, if they stick to what they're currently saying the DMA requires,

1:47:48I don't think Siri AI is ever coming to the EU. I mean, and I know that sounds, that sounds crazy, but there are feet, you know, iPhone mirroring still hasn't come to the EU and that's now an old feature. It's like two years old, right? And I don't see any future where it is coming. And that's much smaller than Siri AI overall. But I, I really don't see it happening and that creates an incredible, it goes back to, again, to what we were talking in the first half of the show.

1:48:19I mean, Siri AI is not groundbreaking in terms of its intelligence, but it is totally groundbreaking in the utility of Siri on your device. It is useful. It works. It is, it, the hardest part of using it is remembering that it's actually good and I don't think it's ever coming to the EU and which makes EU iOS devices a second-class experience in the world. Yeah. At WWDC, me and you were in the same briefing about this with Greg Joswiak and some other Apple people.

1:48:50Yeah. And leaving that, my impression was, one, Apple is unhappy about this whole situation. They're unhappy that they can't ship this feature and they're unhappy at the lack of cooperation from the European Union on trying to ship it, trying to work together on a plan. And then they kind of went silent. Like there was the report of the talk with the EU digital person that went well, apparently. But now I'm imagining that Apple has seen this list of requests from the EC to Google

1:49:20and inside they're just like, oh, we dodged a bullet with this one. Thank God we didn't build this system out just for them to come back with all of this crap. It's like, I left that briefing optimistic that they would probably, you could tell that Apple wanted to come together with the EU and figure something out. But now I'm less optimistic. I think you're right that it's probably just not going to happen. Right. And I do think that some of the initial coverage was too focused on the fact

1:49:51that Apple was like, and again, it goes back to the way that lawyers just ask for everything at the start and then they find out if they need to dial it back. And Apple was like, and in addition to if you'll look at our TSA proposal and give us a thumbs up or tell us to add a couple of items and maybe we can come to, okay, we said A, B, and C, you say A, B, C, plus D, and E, and we'll say, how about just A, B, C, and D, and you'll say, okay, that's good. Build that and then they can go ahead.

1:50:22In addition to that, they were like, and how about you just let us ship Siri AI now while we build this as it is? And the EU is like, no, that, you know, and too many people focused on that as Apple asking for a complete, a permanent, complete exemption. That was just Apple shooting for the moon. I don't think Apple really had any hopes that the EU was going to say, sure, go ahead and ship that while you build it because from the EU's perspective, it doesn't make any sense. I mean,

1:50:52to say, sure, you can ship what you have now that's non-compliant while you build the compliant thing because if they were to grant that exemption, it wouldn't exactly inspire Apple to build the TSA system speedily. Right. You know what I mean? Well, and in the court of public perception too, if Apple shipped Siri as it exists today, and then in a year they couldn't come to an agreement with the EU and the EU's like, you got to take it away. Apple can point to the EU

1:51:23and say, look at what these people are making us do. Right. And they never say that you'll have to take it away. Like, the EU's options to Google in their guidance to Google for Android doesn't include or just remove Gemini in the EU. Yeah. It's entirely predicated on the idea that they're just going to build a system that allows third parties to build equivalent systems. But I don't even know at this point if Google can comply by removing Gemini because what happens to the people who don't update their devices,

1:51:53right, that they can't guarantee that everybody who's already got Gemini, I mean, I guess because Gemini has a cloud component that they can kind of revoke the functionality remotely even if you don't update your device. But I think now that, you know, it's much harder to, and there's the perception of, hey, you bought a Samsung phone that did this and now you've, you know, it updated overnight and now you've lost all these cool features that you were using is generally users don't react well

1:52:24to that sort of update in a way that you never had it in the first place might frustrate users who pay attention but the typical users don't even know what they're missing. Exactly. But I really do think, I mean, that's why I continue to take an outsized interest in the whole story because I really, you know, A, even just for the next two, three years, I think this creates this profound difference in the iOS experiences

1:52:55between people who live in the EU and people who live anywhere else in the world. But then it, that divide will keep forking as the years go by, right? Like, where things will be 10 years ago, 10 years from now could be profoundly different and I don't think the European Commission understands it. I really don't. And I do think, again, I might be pro-American biased, you know, but I really do think that the people in the European Commission have an outsized assumption

1:53:26about the influence and importance of the European Union and that they just assume that, oh, they can bluff all they want but they'll come and comply because the EU is so important. and I think the truth is, no, that rather than comply with these extraordinary demands, these, you know, Apple and Google and the others will really just sort of, they're not going to walk away from the EU but they're going to landlock EU users without new features going forward.

1:53:56It just is unfortunate for the EU users and that at a certain point, if what you're trying to do isn't working, what you're trying to do to help consumers in your market isn't working, then you need to step back and reassess and say, okay, why isn't, why aren't Apple and Google jumping through these hoops like we're asking them to? Right. If your intent is purely to make the experience better for consumers. Right. And I think Jaws, I'm paraphrasing to some degree but in Jaws' remarks in that briefing were on the record

1:54:27but it basically he concluded with we're asking the EU who is this for? You know, and I really do think it comes down to that and it's that question of who is this for? How in the world is this benefiting the citizenry of the EU? And I don't think it is. It's like they're too caught up in some kind of ideal that isn't going to come to pass where the companies like Apple and Google run these platforms like open source

1:54:57public utilities when they are not and they're caught up in the ideal at the expense of every practical actual experience of the people who use these products and that there are no other products that do comply. Right. It's not like, oh, Apple's going to they may not like it but they'll eat the shit sandwich and comply because otherwise people are going to buy the Nokia phone and the whatever else,

1:55:28you know, the Blackberry or whatever. Well, those companies don't exist anymore. You know, those platforms don't exist. There are no alternatives, you know, and you could say, well, that's the problem, you know, that it's a duopoly but that the DMA doesn't change that, you know, you have to deal with the real world not the ideal one that you wish we had where there was an open phone that these companies had to compete with and that users loved and sold in quantities and that they would abandon their iPhones for. Those phones don't exist. So, I don't know.

1:56:00But it's curious to me and, you know, and it's not curious at all that we haven't heard anything in August because everybody in the EU takes off from like the end of July till September. So, all right. That's all I got, Chance. Anything else you wanted to talk about? Anything else happen

Show wrap-up and sponsor thanks

1:56:16while we were recording? I don't believe so. I think we're in the clear. All right. We only broke one piece of news.

1:56:25Everybody who wants to follow Chance's fine reporting and writing and your whole team of colleagues at 9to5mac.com.

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1:57:06So thanks to them. Thanks to you, Chance. Great show. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.